


the place you were a second before

by levendis



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alien Biology, Body Horror, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Kid Fic, Misgendering, Mpreg, Plant Touching, Postpartum Depression, Xenophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-30
Updated: 2015-07-30
Packaged: 2018-04-12 02:52:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4462733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/levendis/pseuds/levendis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clara had wanted children, but this isn't exactly what she'd had in mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the place you were a second before

Between the explosions and the angry guards, there hadn’t been much time to ask questions. Someone had taken Valentina’s hand, and said _run_ , so she had let her hand be held, and she’d run.

Now, she’s inside a garden, which is inside a 1967 Citroën DS, which is parked in the middle of an apparently post-apocalyptic Piccadilly Circus. She’s been here for some time now. The Citroën-garden, not the apocalypse. Although she’s been in the apocalypse for a while as well. She’d never meant to stay, only her hand kept being grabbed and she kept being told to run, so. She kept running.

There was time to ask questions now, though.

“So. Danny. Short for Daniel? Or Danielle?”

“Both. Neither.” Danny continues pruning the rose bush that grows up the side of the - whatever that is, humming contentedly.

“You’re an alien.” Valentina hops off her perch on the branch of a dogwood tree, circling around to get a better look at Danny’s face. For clues. If she’s going to be a private detective, she has to learn how to read people.

“Sort of.”

She narrows her eyes. “Are you going to answer any questions directly, or is your Mysterious Persona too precious to give up?”

“I could tell you a story,” Danny says. “Might help pass the time.” They put the shears down, eyes crinkling with a smile.

 

* * *

If Clara Oswald wants to dance, Clara Oswald is going to dance. Take a perfectly lovely ball and turn it somehow into a war zone, well, that’s how you find yourself digging the boombox out of storage, and finding your 20 Greatest Waltzes cassette tape, and giving your girlfriend her legally-guaranteed romantic dance in your TARDIS’s console room. Deal with it.

The Doctor is grimacing a little, but she can tell he enjoys it. Or at least he enjoys the fact that she enjoys it, which is close enough. He’s loosening up, gradually. Letting her take the lead. He knows, just about, all the steps, and she’s watched _The Sound of Music_ enough times to know how this goes. The dip, the twirl, the lean-in of sexual tension. They move in sync to the tinny sounds of the Blue Danube Waltz.

He’s giving in, she knows, to the goofy sentimentality. These old traditions, the fantasy of a formal courtship. He spins her around, he squeezes her hand, and then-

“ _Ow._ ” She yanks her hand away, ducking out of his embrace. There’s a dozen little pinpricks on her palm, red and stinging. They don’t hurt badly, but the fact that they hurt at all is some reason for concern. Understatement.

The Doctor is standing very still, hands jammed in his pockets. “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he says tightly. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m fine. It’s just - I’m not - what _was_ that?” She tries to not nurse her injured hand more than strictly necessary.

“Nothing. It was nothing. Probably some shrapnel I missed. Anyway, we’re late.” He’s bustling around, trying to substitute moving for talking again.

“Late?” She echoes.

“For the party,” he says, grinning. He flips a lever, and they’re off.

(The party sucks, and that’s how you wind up having an impromptu cheese-and-wine picnic in one of your eight thousand gardens/parks/miscellaneous outdoor spaces somehow trapped inside a police box.)

 

* * *

Clara’s reading a trashy romance novel. If she wants some cheap thrills and shirtless men riding horses into the sunset, and heaving bosoms, she’s gonna get them. Deal with it. Edith is about to bed a stable boy -  maybe there will be a riding crop involved, oh - and then. Clara lifts her eyes off the page, tucking in a bookmark. Hmm.

Something’s different. No, something is wrong. Terribly, unfathomably wrong. The ship? The vortex? An alien intruder? The book falls abandoned to the floor. She steels herself and scans the room. Go-mode, adventure-panic-mode. But there’s nothing, no one there.

Except for the Doctor, and whatever is now spilling invisibly out of him.

She’s afraid, although somehow she knows she’s not in danger. Like how summer thunderstorms are frightening. The not-storm grows: the impression but not the effect of wind, of waves, of something primal crashing over her.

Then, as swiftly as it arrived, it vanishes, leaving her shivering, gasping for air, and somehow almost sorry to see it go.

She doesn’t have to turn around to know the Doctor is behind her. “That was you,” she said flatly.

“I’m sorry.” His voice is strange. Too soft, too high-pitched.

She pulls herself together as much as she can, and turns to face him. “What was that?” Quietly, gently, she hopes kindly.

He’s paler than usual, white-knuckling the railing. Like he’s afraid what might happen if he lets go. His face is blank, eyes closed, body tensed and straining.

She goes to join him, intending to hug him. Physical comfort where words had failed. She makes it halfway up the steps before he jerks his head towards her, eyes snapping open, wild and bright-blue and inhuman. She swallows, trying to ignore the shudder of fear that runs through her. She reaches out to touch him, but stops short.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, choked and desperate. Then he bolts, swallowed up by the TARDIS hallways, and she’s left alone.

“Nope,” she announces to the empty room. “You’re not getting off that easily.”

 

The ship leads her on a winding path, corridors shifting and looping around. The air is getting warmer. Left turn, another left, another left. She takes off her jumper and drops it on the floor, and keeps moving. The walls themselves almost moving, almost breathing. Left, and left, and left. And she finds him.

The door is open, and his ship had taken her here, but she still feels like she’s intruding as she steps over the threshold. The room is bright white, bare except for a cot, and swelteringly hot. She loosens the collar of her blouse and walks over to the figure huddled on the cot. The Doctor is not a large man, but he seems so impossibly small here, just skin and bones, narrow shoulders shaking. Small and too pale and oh, fuck, what if he’s _dying_?

“Do a scan,” she demands, with a confidence she doesn’t feel. “Find out what’s wrong with him.”

The ship sighs, but dutifully pops a panel out of the wall. The panel slides aside with a pneumatic hiss to reveal a computer screen, flicking rapidly through images, text, undecipherable symbols.

“Thanks,” she says, and settles down cross-legged on the floor to wait.

Two hours (ish) later, he wakes up. Very carefully, he assembles himself into something approaching a sitting position.

“You smell weird,” she says, still on the floor.

“Thanks.”

“Not bad. Just weird. Like - burning honey? Maybe?”

He swings his legs over the side of the cot, hands clenching his knees. “I’m fine, Clara. I just need some rest. I’ll drop you off back home, take a couple naps, and pick you up when-”

“You’re in heat,” she blurts out.

“That’s ridiculous.” _Patently ridiculous_ , his eyebrows echo.

“I asked the TARDIS what was the matter with you. The TARDIS said you were in heat. You calling your ship a liar?”

“I’m saying the TARDIS sometimes oversimplifies complex concepts when she thinks you won’t understand.” He rocks forward, attempting to stand up, but falls back with a resigned sigh. Legs don’t quite work yet, apparently.

She frowns. “Wait. Hold up. We’ve been having absolutely massive amounts of sex. Wouldn’t that have - taken care of things?”

“Those things are not these things,” he says, gesturing at himself. “This is something different.”

“Something you didn’t want to tell me about.” That familiar, careworn anger rising up inside her.

“How could I?”

He sounds broken, and he looks broken, and she’d feel bad except he’s being a bastard and she is so, so over walking on eggshells around his fragile ego. So she scrambles to her feet and folds her arms and glares and says, “With _words._ ”

“It’s not that simple-”

“It is,” she interrupts. “Tell me what’s going on. Now. Or I’m out. I’m not doing this with you again, Doctor.”

Silence. Even the TARDIS is quiet. It’s just them, and this nothing room, and her heart thudding, and his uneven breathing, and this thing, whatever it is, this uncertainty between them.

“My body has decided it’s in a good position to procreate,” he says finally. Stiffly, formally, like something out of a waiting-room pamphlet. “And it’s changing to better suit that purpose.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“So you’re. Ovulating?”

He rolls his eyes. “If that gross inaccuracy makes you happy, then by all means, yes, why not, I’m ovulating. It doesn’t matter. It’ll stop on its own, and everything will be fine. I just need to wait it out.”

The gears in her brain are turning. That five-steps-ahead-of-conscious-thought thing she tends to save for special occasions, like avoiding imminent death and explosions. She opens her mouth and, without quite realizing what it is that she’s thinking, says: “What if we don’t wait it out?”

 

* * *

_I need your genetic material_ , he’d said. She’d imagined sexual intercourse, of course she had, how do you do this without fucking? She cleans and primps and picks out her favorite lingerie. She’s prepared physically, emotionally. How hard could this be? They’d been intimate before, this was nothing new. Minus, she figures, some alien birth-control doohickey she’d never noticed before, or whatever. As far as being a mother, raising a kid with this man - yeah, she wants that. She’s as ready as she’ll ever be.

When she comes to their room, she’s forced to admit she may have misjudged the situation. The bed is gone. In its place, a plain table, two high-backed kitchen chairs. A first-aid kit and a six pack of chocolate pudding on the table.

“Oh,” she says, faintly embarrassed. “You’re gonna just swab my cheek, I guess.”

“No,” he mumbles around a mouthful of pudding. “D'you remember that night we were dancing?”

“We need to dance?”

“We need to do what stopped us.” He sighs, sets his spoon and empty pudding cup down. Cracks his knuckles. There’s a flush spreading up his neck, and his eyes are bashful when they meet hers. He cracks his knuckles again, and holds his right hand up.

“Hi.” She waves.

He huffs out a laugh. Still blushing. Hand extended for her examination. “Look.”

And she looks. She knows his hands, the wrinkles and sinews and bone. But that, there, no, she doesn’t know _that_. Something moving beneath the surface, a trembling, a sort of blur. His flesh stretches, rising into sharp points along his life line. Then they flatten abruptly, skin smoothing and relaxing. He closes his hand into a fist, and drops it into his lap.

“Oh,” she breathes. “Is that. How you…?”

“Yeah, basically.” He quirks a grin, but he looks scared. Prepared for rejection. Something, he looks like - she doesn’t know what he looks like.

“Alright. So. Let’s do it.” She can do this. They can do this.

He lays his hands flat on the table, palms up. Allowing herself one last moment of hesitation, she pauses. This is a deliberate decision, a commitment. She smiles up at him, holds his gaze, holding the warmth and affection and uncertainty she finds there. And she takes his hands.

She flinches but does not pull away when his skin shifts, sharpens under her touch. His eyes are closed. Concentrating, withdrawing to some hidden place deep within himself. The teeth, or the thorns, or the spines, pressing into her. It stings, and then hurts outright, and then slowly the pain stops mattering. A tendril of something soothing is weaving its way through her. Biological, mental, she couldn’t even guess. And behind that, an offering: a tentative joy, held behind a shaky barrier. She welcomes it. _Of course, of course you can share this with me._

A joy, a strange sort of ecstasy. Not sexual, not anything she has a name for. A foreign but immense pleasure spreading from the top of her head to the tips of her toes. She closes her eyes, and lets herself be swept away.

 

* * *

The Doctor wants to go on adventures, and he would, only he keeps passing out. After the fifth failed mission to the great beyond, he gives up. He starts spending a lot of time lying down. Half-asleep, maybe, conscious but not all there. The TARDIS builds him a cocoon, a sort of pod-bed-thing with swarms of wires and prehensile tubes filled with gunk Clara doesn’t want to know about. It’s alarming, but not the most alarming thing she’s seen in the past month. She can deal with it.

He’s in the pod. She’s in the chair she dragged in from the console room, reading an Improving Novel she can’t quite focus on. This is how their days go now.

She’s not worried. She tries not to be worried. She turns a page, only to realize she doesn’t remember what happened on the page before it.

“Hey,” he says softly. “C'mere.”

She closes her book, not bothering with a bookmark. Scooting her chair up, she pushes through the curtain of tubes and gives him a careful hug. Smooths his hair back, gives him a quick peck on the lips. Wouldn’t do to get too into things, with him in this state. Adding sexual frustration to the mix is the last thing she needs to do.

Ducking her head to hide a blush (okay, maybe a _little_ sexual frustration), she presses a hand to his belly, which is as flat as it ever was. Nothing swelling or moving, just that slight bit of softness he’s had since regeneration.

“I know what you’re looking for, and it’s not gonna happen,” he says. “I’m not human, that’s not how it works.”

“Right. I know. I remember. It’s just hard to wrap my mind around.” She smiles apologetically, then extracts herself from the pod, leans back in her chair.

“You can go, you know. You know how to pilot the TARDIS well enough to get you home. Take a break, get some fresh air. I can manage on my own.”

“I’m not leaving.” The bastard and his damn self-pity, how can he think that about her? She purses her lips and narrows her eyes: _don’t play that game with me, son._

He sighs, shifts in the nest. “And if I told you I want some time alone?”

Oh. Well. Fine. She has been a bit clingy, it’s true. Only he’s having a baby. A _baby_. They’re having a Time Baby. Maybe she could use some fresh air. Clear her head. Do something frivolous, drink something caffeinated and overly sweet.

 

So she does what she sometimes does, which is grab the Doctor’s possibly-fraudulent credit card and run out to the shops. The sun is shining, birds are chirping, it’s a beautiful day. She comes back a few hours later weighed down with bags filled with onesies and tiny shoes and adorable miniature woolen hats. Sure, the TARDIS probably already has all this stuff, but this is what _she_ chose, as a mother-to-be, and besides: cute. She slurps the rest of her mocha frappe loudly through the straw and sets the cup down on a computer bank, because the TARDIS has all the stuff except trash bins.

“Hey.” The Doctor is balanced precariously against the central console. He looks exhausted. Just seeing him upright is nice, though.

“You feeling better?” She lets the bags slide off her arms.

“I, uh.” He swallows, sways. “I think. Um. It’s time.”

“Time. To give - it’s been _two weeks_.” She’s not panicking, no.

“Told you that’s not how it works,” he says, grinning weakly, and then collapses.

The TARDIS scoops them up before Clara has a chance to move, deposits them in a room she’s never seen before. A nursery, she manages to comprehend, before everything goes utterly haywire.

 

* * *

She’s been crying a lot, lately. The Doctor does his best to not look visibly betrayed. The TARDIS carefully shifts walls between them. She’d thought she was better than this. Apparently not.

He’d said it would be difficult. He’d said it’d be different. She hadn’t been expecting this. She was human, the Doctor looked human, surely their child would be normal. Within certain parameters. And it wasn’t. Maybe he’d been cheating on her with an octopus, it was a more reasonable explanation than it having anything to do with her.

She’d tried to ignore her revulsion. Parents are supposed to love their children, parents are supposed to be accepting. Not afraid, not fighting the impulse to flee, not choking back waves of nausea. She’d failed.

_They’re still figuring out what they want to be,_ he’d said. _Right now, it wants tentacles. Might stick, might not, just have to wait and see_. It’s a baby, it shouldn’t have to decide how to be a baby, it should just exist, it should cry and eat and sleep, boy or girl but it should be beautiful and hers, theirs, it should be -

And it’s not. She’d looked into the face of her newborn child, and she hadn’t recognized it at all. So she’d run. She hasn’t stopped running.

 

* * *

“Thank you,” the Doctor says. “I know this is hard for you.”

He’s taking a break from micromanaging the baby’s care. He hasn’t named it yet. He’s waiting on her, she thought. She’d stopped by, feeling like an asshole for avoiding them, had tried to help. She didn’t know how to help. So she’d made them tea. It’s almost normal, almost like it had been, before.

“I’m fine. It’s good. Just needed some time to adjust.”

“I thought we weren’t lying to each other anymore,” he says tiredly. He does look tired, very tired, if happier and more relaxed than he’s been in a long while. He looks like a new dad, and it’s almost normal.

She’s not going to start crying again. She’s not.

“It - _they_ keep changing. It’s like I have to keep meeting my own child for the first time, over and over, and it’s-” Exhausting. Frustrating. Heartbreaking. D), all of the above. She collapses slowly onto the floor, head down to hide the tears in her eyes or the guilt or to just not look at anything anymore.

He sits down beside her and puts his arm around her shoulders. “I used to have a chin and no eyebrows, now I have eyebrows and no chin. I changed. Time Lords change, it’s what we do.”

“Not like that,” she protests, trying very hard not to sniffle.

“Yes, like that. Sometimes. When there’s not enough genetic material to work from, when there’s no extended family to act as support system, when there’s no Matrix, no guides, no…” No Gallifrey. When you’re the only one left and you’re trying to build it all back up from scratch.

How out-of-control were their egos that they had actually thought they could pull this off?

“So it’s our fault. That he’s - she’s - _they’re_ -” She buries her face in her hand and curls up tighter, willing herself to disappear.

He shuffles around and, after some awkward maneuvering, manages to get her onto his lap. “It’s not an ideal situation, I’ll admit. But we’ll make it work. They’ll be fine. They’ll need - I don’t know what they’ll need. We’ll find out, okay? And the next thing you know, you’ll be happy to have two whiny, overemotional Gallifreyans on your hands.”

She giggles, and then starts bawling. The tears are different than usual, though. A new-age type might call them cleansing. It’s like she’s coughing up a week’s worth of fear and resentment and sadness, and loss for what might have been, and shame, and whatever. Getting snot all over the Doctor’s t-shirt but, hell, it was pretty grungy before she started using it as a tissue. He holds her and lets her cry herself empty. She holds his hand. They sit there for a while, on the cold linoleum.

She can do this. They can do this. Probably.

 

* * *

The room is dark.

“Hey,” she says. Hands braced on the bulkhead behind her. “It’s Clara. Remember me?” She flattens herself against the wall, breathing evenly and deliberately.

The kid can’t speak yet, but they understand, the Doctor had said. The kid’s capable of some basic telepathy. Something vaguely shaped like a ‘yes’ forms in her mind.

She steps forward, and so does the kid. Two tentacles today, and feathers. And Clara’s nose, a miniature upturned-button thing poking out of the white plumage.

“I wanted to be a mermaid,” she blurts out. “When I was little. If you want to be a bird, I - I get it.” She bites her lip, and sticks out her hand. “I’m sorry I ignored you. I’d like to be friends, if that’s okay.”

The kid hesitates, then wraps the end of one of his tentacles around her wrist. It’s warm and dry and it’s not awful. A tentacle, so what. She feels a raw empathic buzz, an untrained version of what she feels from the Doctor. And she feels, oh, if she can manage to sort this out. Hope and loneliness and an unqualified love, and fear, and something that seems suspiciously like humor. The kid’s laughing at her. Not unkindly, but still. That’ll be his dad’s influence.

If they can walk, let 'em go, he’d said. Time Tots grow up fast, none of your human crying-potato-for-three-years nonsense.

“C'mon. Let’s go to the park. I think there’s a swing-set or two rattling around somewhere.”

The kid tugs on her hand until she looks down. Something like _Named_ , in her head. “Yeah? You have a name?”

_Shown what should be_ , ish. _Danny_. Definitely. She chokes back a sob, and grins widely, and lets little octopus-bird Danny lead her to the park.

 

* * *

Valentina wipes her eyes. She’s not crying, she’s just developed an allergy to pollen. There’s a lot of pollen everywhere. “So you’re half-human,” she says.

“On my mother’s side.” Danny leans back on the bench, looking incredibly self-satisfied.

“Huh.” She squints at him, looking for any tics or tells. “Wait. You’re not messing with me, are you?”

“Could be.”

She rolls her eyes. Half-human, all-asshole. “Tell me how they met?”

“It’s a good story, but a long one. And we’ve got an apocalypse to tend to.” Danny makes an impatient _c'mon_ gesture with their third arm, and she laughs and grabs a hold of it, lets them pull her out of the garden-Citroën, into paradoxically-war-torn Piccadilly Circus.

_It’ll be fun_ , they’re saying. _I promise. Hurry up, and don’t wander off._


End file.
